Deb never turned up, and there was a bit of a contretemps this morning. When she came into my room she was naturally not in a trance state and she saw the lamp still on my bedside table. I imagine Helmuth must have more or less threatened to flay her alive if he ever found out that she had failed to remove it, as she went into a frightful flap.
I managed to laugh the matter off and she thinks that she forgot it through a normal lapse of memory; but she remarked rather sinisterly: ‘I can’t think what came over me last night.’
Later, in the garden, I put her under, and got the low-down on why she had failed to carry out my orders.
It appears that after she had tucked me up she decided that the time had come for her to have a show-down with Helmuth, so she went along to his study. With the idea of making him jealous she told him that she didn’t care for him any more and was going to get engaged to Owen Gruffydd.
Helmuth’s reaction to that was just what I could have told her it would be. After half-an-hour’s talk over a couple of glasses of port he took her along to her room and seduced her afresh. She, poor mutt, imagines that she has pulled off her big trick and won him back to her because he could not bear the thought of losing her to another man. But I’d bet my bottom dollar that the real set-up is that Helmuth does not really give a damn for her; it simply provided him with a little cynical amusement, and flattered his sense of power, to dispose of Gruffydd with a snap of his fingers, and make her his mistress again in spite of the fact that she had told him that she now loved someone else.
It would be interesting to see what happens during the next few weeks, if I were going to remain here—but I hope to Heaven that I’m not. My forecast would be that Helmuth would derive a lot of fun from proceeding to neglect her again until she went back to Gruffydd; perhaps he would even let her get engaged, then he would seduce her once more, and so on, until the wretched woman became half crazy with misery and despair. As it is I hope to make my exit tonight, and so break up the whole party.
To continue about last night. At a quarter to one Deb’s mind clicked over and she suddenly realised that she had to come and get me out of the house, so she got out of bed and started to dress. Unfortunately Helmuth was still there, and at first he could not make out what the devil had got into her, as she flatly refused either to answer his questions or obey him when he told her to come back to bed, but simply went on dressing without uttering a word. Then he jumped to the conclusion that she must have dropped off to sleep and was sleep-walking.
As far as I can make out, he took her by the shoulders, imposed his will upon her and, his hypnotic powers being stronger than mine, woke her up. Luckily for me she accepted the explanation that she had been sleep-walking, although she has never known herself do such a thing before, and immediately he brought her out of her trance she naturally lost all memory of the orders I had given her. So things might have turned out worse, as it seems that neither of them suspect the real reason for her apparently strange behaviour.
Unless I am entirely wrong in my assessment of Helmuth’s psychology, I don’t think that he will spend the night with her again until he can get a fresh kick out of once more believing himself to have brought her to heel against her will. I don’t think, either, that she is such a fool as to betray her own weakness by asking him to do so as early as tonight, and, even if she does, I can see him beginning the process of twisting her tail by making some excuse to refuse her.
So I think the odds are all against my being held up by the same sort of hitch two nights running.